Large stone signs that read “Willkommen” greet travelers headed into New Ulm, Minnesota, from every direction. August Schell and Jacob Bernhardt opened the local brewery in 1860, one year before Henry David Thoreau got off a steamer on the Minnesota River, strolled along the streets, and later wrote in his journal, “It is a German town.”
Many of its founders were Turners (gymnasts), members of a movement of free thinkers that began as a gymnastics association in 1811. They fled their home country of Germany after a failed revolution in 1848, built New Ulm’s first Turner Hall in 1858 at the town center, and built another in 1865 after the first was destroyed in the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Gymnastics classes are still held upstairs three days a week, and the rathskeller downstairs is the oldest bar in the state. Eight murals of landscapes depicting castles throughout Europe were painted in 1873. A three-sided bar seats 14, and most of the beers on tap are made at August Schell Brewing. They include beers that adhere strictly to Bavaria’s well-known beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot. Schell’s oldest beer, Deer Brand, and its best seller, Grain Belt, both include a good measure of corn in the recipe.
“What kills me is the Germans who come over here will drink Deer Brand. You would think the Germans would want the heavier, maltier product, but … ,” said Ted Marti, whose family has owned the brewery since Schell bought out Bernhardt in 1866.1 “They’ll whine and complain that Budweiser is watered down. I think that’s why we weren’t competitive in the strongholds of Bud and Miller. People think of Deer Brand as a heavier malt (flavor).”
Marti does not have Schell’s brewing logs from the nineteenth century, so he cannot pinpoint whether August would have been the first to brew with adjuncts or if it was his son, Otto, who took over as manager after his father died in 1891. The oldest records at Schell’s establish that brewers added cerealine, pregelatinized corn flakes, by the early 1900s, but Marti suspects they started earlier. It had become standard practice elsewhere.
Theodore Oehne, vice president of Conrad Seipp Brewing in Chicago, made the reason clear when he testified before a Senate committee in 1899. “Our business has taught us in the last 10 or 12 years that a pure malt beer is almost unsalable in this country; it is too strong and heavy. The people want a lighter beer, and this light beer could not be produced by using pure malt,” he said. “Pure malt beer is a strong, heavy beer” (Adulteration of Food Products: Hearings Before the Committee of Manufacturers 1900, 295).
Like German tourists today, drinkers knew what they liked.
*****
By the time the rest of the world discovered corn, which Columbus called maize, it had spread far from its origins in Mexico nearly 9,000 years before and into much of the Americas. The corn-growing area extended from southern North Dakota and both sides of the lower St. Lawrence River Valley southward to northern Argentina and Chile long before Columbus took the grain to Europe. It reached westward to the middle of Kansas and Nebraska, and an important lobe of the Mexican area extended northward to Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Colorado.
It was always abundant, and more so as the Midwest developed in the nineteenth century. Farmers planted it in the woodland clearings and grasslands of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and adjacent states. These were places where corn had not been grown widely in prehistoric times. Just like the Native Americans centuries before, when farmers needed to produce more corn, they planted more acres. Eventually, of course, they ran out of land. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, scientists bred hybrid strains of corn with bigger ears that could bunch more closely together in the field, and yield per acre increased dramatically.
This ongoing process left us with corn that likely tastes little like it did in the nineteenth century, and the change was not necessarily more extraordinary than what occurred in southern Mexico 9,000 years ago, when corn was first domesticated. It took several hundred to a thousand years of natural selection to transform a native grass, related to the Mexican variety called teosinte, into maize. That corn was much less uniform. Plants may have ranged from no more than a couple of feet to as high as 20 feet. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492 the plant probably looked much like it does today, although the ears were smaller and held fewer kernels.
Malting maize did not prove to be as easy as Thomas Hariot suggested in 1585 (see page 27), nor did it produce “a good ale as was to be desired.” Settlers in almost every colony brewed with corn during the following 250 years, but the grain was always a second or third choice, often used out of desperation. On February 14, 1775, as supplies of both imported beer and malt began to dwindle before the Revolutionary War began, a Virginia Gazette reader shared a recipe for beer made using corn stalks.
The stalks, green as they were, as soon as pulled up, were carried to a convenient trough, then chopped and pounded so much that by boiling all the juice could be extracted out of them; which juice every planter almost knows is of as saccharine a quality almost as any thing can be, and that any thing of a luxuriant corn stalk is very full of it.… After this pounding, the stalks and all were put into a large copper, there lowered down in its sweetness with water, to an equality with common abservations in malt wort, and then boiled, till the liquor in a glass is seen to break, as the brewers term it; after that it is strained, and boiled again with hops. The beer I drank had been made above twenty days, and bottled off about four days.
In 1815 The American Practical Brewer and Tanner provided detailed instructions for malting corn. Author Joseph Coppinger, who also lobbied long and hard for the establishment of a national brewery, suggested malting only in the summer months, when temperatures were higher, and using corn taken freshly from the cob. He drew a distinction between southern corn and northern corn. Southern corn required 72 hours of steeping, and northern corn, apparently because it was harder, took 96 hours. The corn was turned during drying much as barley would be, then kilned. It took 10 days after steeping for southern corn to be ready, 12 for northern (Coppinger 1815, 44).
Former President Thomas Jefferson was so interested in the process of malting corn that he had his bookseller acquire the information before the book was released. In 1815 he wrote to Coppinger: “We tried it here the last fall with perfect success, and I shall use it principally hereafter.” This beer was brewed to be served only at his estate. Jefferson may not have started a national trend, but brewers remained interested in using corn in malted form. In The Complete Practical Brewer, published in 1852, M.L. Byrn wrote that any grain other than barley used for making beer was of lower quality before providing a description of how corn could be malted.
Besides this, many other grains are used for the purpose of making beer.… The common Indian corn is often used in this country for making beer, but not in any other that I know of. The process of converting it into malt is not that which has been stated by some British authors, and others, viz. “burying the grain under the ground and when germination has made sufficient progress, it is dug up and kiln-dried.” The process consists of putting a quantity of the grain into a large hogshead, or other suitable vessel, with perforations in the bottom for the water to escape, and keeping it moistened with warm water until germination has commenced; it is then left for the germination process to proceed far enough, when it is taken out and dried in the usual manner. (Looney 2011, 438-439)
There is evidence that barley was grown in pre-Columbian America, but there was none on the East Coast when colonists arrived. They planted the same two-row varieties used in England or in continental Europe, and those grew adequately on the coast. However, as production moved to western New York and then to the Midwest, six-row barley introduced by the Spanish (see page 169) was easier and more profitable to grow. Six-row barley has higher levels of nitrogen and a thicker husk, so on its own produces beer with poor physical stability that is less attractive, and most drinkers agree it does not taste as good as beer brewed with two-row barley.
Anton Schwarz, an immigrant from Bohemia, taught American brewers that six-row has a symbiotic relationship with adjuncts, mostly corn and rice. Because it has more enzymatic power than two-row, it can convert the starch in adjuncts into sugar. Because the proteins in the unmalted cereals are not solubilized to a great extent during mashing, they dilute the highly soluble nitrogen content of the six-row to produce a beer with better physical stability. At the time, it was both lighter on the palate and brighter than beers brewed with all two-row barley malt (McCabe 1999, 75).
Less than 30 years after brewers began using what Schwarz called the “double mash method,” adjunct lagers were the norm. In “Liquid Bread: An Examination of the American Brewing Industry, 1865 to 1940,” Martin Stack questions if these pale lagers rose to dominance simply because they were not as “heavy” and looked dazzling when poured into a glass.
The standard story assumes the consumers benefited from high quality beer. I argue that the move to pasteurized, packaged beer, shipped greater and greater distances, lowered the quality of beer. Though the large shippers enjoyed some economics of scale in production, these advantages were offset through considerable advertising expenditures and high transportation costs, which drove up retail prices. (Stack 2014, 187)
Stack, a professor at Rockhurst University, provides context for understanding why adjuncts have been blamed as a reason that American beer developed into a monoculture—a very bland and boring monoculture—by the 1970s. In the decades that followed the revival of Anchor Brewing in 1965, proponents of a new beer culture, sometimes a counterculture, made adjuncts, and corn in particular, a villain. It would be fair to call adjuncts accomplices, but they did not wring flavor out of beer on their own.
Because various efficiencies eventually allowed brewers to use fewer hops and maintain the same level of bitterness, charting historic hop usage is not a perfect way to measure the reduction in overall amount of ingredients, and therefore flavor. However, it works as a general proxy, and US hop consumption fell from more than one pound per barrel at the beginning of the twentieth century to 0.43 pounds per barrel in 1950 and 0.23 pounds per barrel in 1970.
George Fix and Jeff Renner were among homebrewers who, after studying the history of pre-Prohibition lagers, lobbied to have them considered in a separate category from modern-day American lagers in homebrew competitions. Resurrected recipes are reminders that American pale lagers were stronger and hoppier in the nineteenth century, but that they also contained a percentage of adjuncts. (See Jeff Renner’s recipe page 271.)
“We all looked down our noses at using adjuncts to lighten the beer,” said Boston Beer Company founder Jim Koch. “But it was never about what’s good and bad; it was about who we are and who we aren’t.” However, adjuncts became part of the definition of “craft brewer” the Institute of Brewing Studies (the precursor of the Brewers Association) used in compiling statistics in the mid-1990s. To be considered, breweries were required, among other things, to sell beer brewed with no more than 10 percent adjuncts. That rule was amended over time but remained in force until 2014.
“The idea that there are ingredients that are good and bad makes no sense,” said Mark Jilg of Craftsman Brewing. “I was of the ilk all beer is good, some is better. (When it comes to) disdain for American industrial beer, I think I was late to the game.” He brewed his first beer with corn a few years after opening Craftsman in 1995. He adds a measure of corn to Craftsman 1903, a pale lager that is his best-selling beer.
“1903 is so fun to talk about. You can go back to this pre-twentieth-century reality that beer is local,” Jilg said. He makes that beer with pre-gelatinized flakes, which cost him twice as much per pound as the malted barley and illustrate a modern reality at smaller breweries: It can cost more to brew with corn. This is true even at August Schell, which brews about 100,000 barrels annually with corn syrup.
On a larger scale, such as at D.G. Yuengling & Son, which brews with corn grits, or the facilities operated by Anheuser-Busch InBev and Molson Coors, corn is less expensive than barley malt. The economy of brewing with rice is not as clear. It depends annually on the individual crops of both barley and rice, said David Maxwell, brewing director at Anheuser-Busch InBev.
However, when Schwarz began promoting the use of adjuncts in the late 1860s, he emphasized the cost savings. This was repeated in Theory and Practice of the Preparation of Malt, published in 1882, which advocated just as strongly for potatoes as corn. “The reason for using malt-surrogate—apart from some local beers—will always be to reduce the expense of producing beer,” the authors wrote. “It may be easily ascertained whether it is economical to use substitutes by comparing the quality of the extract, which can be obtained from a substitute, with that to be produced from barley malt, and by comparing the prices of these brewing materials with each other” (Thausing et al. 1882, 430).
The authors also addressed the matter of adulteration. “Everybody in the least acquainted with the chemical processes taking place during the preparation of the wort will not entertain the foolish idea that the using of malt substitutes is an ‘adulteration of the beer,’” they wrote. “It does not matter whether the sugar in the wort comes from the starch in the raw fruit or from barley-malt; sugar always forms the same products during fermentation, namely alcohol and carbonic acid.”
“Adulteration of beer” had been an issue for decades and it would continue to be. In 1667 the legislature of the Massachusetts colony found it necessary to enact a measure that beer should be made “only of good barley and mault without any mixture of molasses, coarse sugar, or other material instead of mault, on penalty of five pounds for every offence” (Arnold and Penman 1933, 48).
Long before members of the Pure Food Movement began to mount a campaign that resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, it was an issue, and one that prohibition forces used as part of their anti-drink message. For instance, in 1835 Edward Delavan, a former wine merchant who helped found the New York Temperance Society, claimed that an Albany brewery was drawing water with which to malt from a pond contaminated by the rotting corpses of animals dumped there by slaughterhouses (Gravina and McLeod 2014, 72).
About that time, the New York State Senate began investigating charges that “ale, beer, and porter manufacture in this state was adulterated by the use of various drugs,” and summoned 20 brewery representatives to testify. The committee eventually found them all guiltless, reporting: “Malt, hops, and water are the only ingredients used in the manufacture of beer; except that at some of the breweries, a little fine salt, and in some cases honey, molasses, or sugar, are used. They admitted to experimenting with grains of paradise, coriander, and licorice root. Every answer denies, unequivocally, the use of noxious or unwholesome drugs, or any article other than malt, water, sugar, honey or molasses, and salt. It will be observed that by some of the answers, that some of the brewers, several years since, tried the experiment of using drugs … but the experiment failed—drugs spoiled the article” (Croswell 1835, No. 88: 3).2
In New Orleans a local German newspaper described the product of the first city brewery, which opened in 1845, as being made of magic—yes, magic—and big barrels of sugarcane syrup mixed with Mississippi River water. More generally, “city beer” was a concoction made, using a secret formula, from fermented molasses and vermouth or wormwood, and contained no preservatives. Beer drinkers added syrup to mitigate the herbal taste and were known to suffer violent hangovers after drinking too much (Merrill 2005, 67).
Corn could never quite duck the implication it is also an adulteration. After Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 the committee in charge of establishing standards for malt liquors tentatively proposed definitions that created a separate class for malt beers that did not include adjuncts. The proposal also included a requirement that lager beers be lagered for at least three months. Testifying before a committee meeting in Chicago, Robert Wahl of the Wahl-Henius Institute pointed out that many beers imported from Bavaria and Bohemia would not meet some of the standards proposed. He also said, “the American brewer does not favor the production of pale beers because they can be more easily produced, but because the public demands them” (American Brewers Review 1908, Vol. 22:126).
Only a few decades before, Schwarz had faced opponents both inside and outside of the brewing industry when he advocated for the use of what he preferred to call “malt substitutes.” He was born in Bohemia in 1839 and studied chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Prague, where he came under the wing of brewing pioneer Karl Balling. He immigrated to the United States in 1868, and soon began working for the only trade journal in the country, The American Brewer. He later opened the United States Brewers’ Academy. In History of the Brewing Industry and Brewing Science in America, John Arnold writes that when Schwarz began as a trade journalist, “secret ingredients and remedies flourished.” He lobbied constantly against such practices.
Schwarz presented an entirely different process for using adjuncts, with a cereal mash at the center. According to Wahl and Henius (1901, 711), it was “the stubborn perseverance with which he sought to convert the conservative brewers to his ideas and finally succeeded in so doing, and last, not least, the discovery of suitable methods for scientifically applying them, (that) entitle him to be called the founder of raw cereal brewing in the United States.”
What is most often referred to today as a cereal mash was called the “double mash.” In 1946, The Practical Brewer outlined a procedure little different than when Schwarz introduced it.
This is the newest of the principal systems and was developed in the United States for the production of pale beer and ale from high enzymatic, high protein, six-row malt and for 20 to 40 percent of adjuncts, which had to be cooked before being added to main mash. The reason for adopting this system was that all-malt beer from the six-row, Manchurian-type barley was too heavy in taste, too dark in color, and of poor stability after bottling. Adjuncts were plentiful and low priced. Diastatic power in malt was ample to also saccharify the starch of unmalted cereals, such as corn grits and rice. Beer made with the new system became more acceptable to the US public, being less satiating, higher in taste and color, and more stable after bottling. The procedure in the double mash method has changed little since its inception less than 70 years ago.
As the name indicates, there are two individual mashes in the typical “double mash method”: one, the main malt mash, consists of the bulk of the ground malt, mashed in with one barrel of water in 100 to 125 pounds of malt at 28° to 36°R (95° to 113°F/35° to 45°C); the other with about 10–20% of [its] weight in crushed malt, mashed together with one barrel of water to 75 pounds material at from 30° to 40°R (99.5° to 122°F/24° to 32°C). The cereal-malt mash is usually brought within one or one and a one-half hours to boiling and boiled for 10 to 90 minutes, sometimes under pressure. Thereafter, the cereal mash is slowly added to the main malt mash, which has been maintained at 28° to 36°R (95° to 113°F/35° to 45°C), thereby raising the temperature of the combined mash to almost 54°R (153.5°F/67.5°C).3
The mash rested one more time for 15 to 30 minutes before being raised to mashout temperature. The malt-mash usually was prepared first.
Main mash: The ground malt should be doughed in with part of the mashing in water, before or while entering mashtub, to avoid loss in dusting and to facilitate thorough mixing. Mash is initially stirred in the mashtub for about 15–30 minutes to bring the readily soluble part of the malt into solution and to expose the harder, more complex matter to the action of the enzymes. Then the mash is permitted to rest at 28° to 36°R (95° to 113°F/35° to 45°C). This period is variously called the “protein rest” or “lactic acid rest.” Usually the total time at this temperature is longer at the lower range of temperature mentioned and shorter at the higher range. (A rest at 28° to 36°R [95° to 113°F/35° to 45°C] was necessary with poorly modified or low-enzymatic malt.)
Cooker mash and combining mashes: The starch of unprocessed cereals, being more flinty than that of malt, requires boiling, together with malt or under high pressure. Usually the malt portion is mixed with water and then the cereals are added. One-half hour after mashing in at 30° to 40°R (99.5° to 122°F/37.5° to 50°C) the mash is slowly raised to 50° to 60°R (144.5° to 167°F/62.5° to 75°C) and held there for 30 minutes. Then the temperature is quickly raised to boiling, cereals are well softened (gelatinized), as can be demonstrated by pressing a sample with the fingers, the cooking process is ended, and the mash is added to the malt mash. The time consumed in adding the cereal mash to the main mash will influence the degree of fermentability of the wort. Fast adding (10 minutes) will increase the dextrin content, while slow adding (20–30 minutes) will increase the fermentable sugar. While the most common conversion temperature is 54°R (153°F/67.5°C), lower temperatures are used to produce wort with higher percentages of fermentable sugar, and considerably higher temperatures (58°R, 167.5°F/72.5°C) [are used] to produce low fermentable wort with high dextrin content. After conversion of the combined mashes, temperature is raised to 58 to 60°R (162.5° to 167°F/72.5° to 75°C) to curtail enzymatic change. The total time consumed by this mashing process will be 2 to 3 1/2 hours. (Vogel 1946, 67-68)
Precisely how many breweries began brewing with malt substitutes by the end of the nineteenth century seems likely to remain a mystery. But after reviewing thousands of primary references while researching Americans Drink Beers with Their Eyes, Greg Casey said, “I believe it is accurate to say virtually all were doing so, with only a handful adhering to only malt, hops, water, and yeast.” He has volumes of supporting evidence, including:
• Internal Revenue data assembled in 1896 reported the actual quantities of rice, corn, glucose, and grape sugar used by brewers, by state. On an industry basis, adjuncts were already being used at 30 to 40 percent replacement rates for malt, with different regions of the country having a preference for one type over the other (specifically the use of rice in the Midwest and corn/glucose/grape sugar in the East).
• Adjunct lager beers were so widespread in the marketplace by the end of the nineteenth century that in federal government hearings held in the early twentieth century to define “what is beer,” industry representatives used language as strong as “virtually extinct” to describe the percentage of all-malt beers in America.
By then, lager accounted for more than 90 percent of beer production, but adjuncts were used in more than just pale lagers. Brewing logs in Louisville (page 41) indicate most Kentucky common was made with a good dose of corn. Wahl and Henius (817) also describe American weissbeer as something different than the Berliner weisse that it was intended to emulate. Wheat malt was sometimes, but not generally, used. Instead, the grist would be made up of pale malt and about 30 percent corn grits. But the brilliant clarity of the American version did not serve weiss as well as it did pale lagers, and did “not seem to catch the fancy of the consumers, who are accustomed to the cloudy, lively article of Berlin fame.”
Equally indicative of change were scores of advertisements in every issue of Western Brewer, a trade magazine, for corn and rice. Just as prominent were ones for cerealine flakes. These gelatinized flakes could be added directly to the mash, so brewers could produce adjunct beers without investing in a cereal cooker.
The discussion, or sometimes advertising propaganda, did not focus on the differences between all-malt beers and those made with adjuncts, but on corn versus rice. There was nothing subtle in Anheuser-Busch’s advertisements in magazines across the country, including the February 22, 1893, issue of Puck:
Corn is a much cheaper article than barley malt. Corn beer is a drinkable beer, but it is a cheap, coarse beer. The difference between corn beer and fine barley-malt beer is the difference between corn bread and fine wheat bread. Of the first you can eat a little, never much, and it is not always certain to assimilate. The latter can be eaten all the time, day after day, year after year, and the result is perfect and exuberant health; it is sweet, wholesome, nourishing, and invigorating. Of corn beer you can drink but little without a protest from the stomach, and the effect is a loss of energy, weariness, stupidity, and drowsiness. The barley-malt beer, however, is a sparkly, spunky, healthy, quickly assimilating drink, with a body and a character smacking and vigorous. Its effect is buoyant, refreshing, and invigorating. ANHEUSER-BUSCH brands are absolutely free from corn or corn preparation. Nothing but highest grade malt and hops are used in its preparation.
Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch, who ultimately had made the decision to brew Budweiser with rice, spoke often and bluntly about his distaste for beers made with corn. “Our main argument must be the quality of our product, that we do not use any corn,” he wrote to a company salesman in 1895. “While nearly every other beer brewed in this country, with hardly one exception, is made of cheaper material, [namely]: corn; that such a beer is not as wholesome or digestible as pure barley malt beer, the small addition of rice only improving it, and that the use of corn makes a very inferior article. The difference in the cost of manufacture between a barley-malt and rice beer and corn beer is one dollar per barrel in favor of the latter, as a matter of course.”
Busch was not alone. On January 30, 1881, a full-page article about beer in the Chicago Daily Tribune stated, “Corn beer is not a drink for Americans or Germans. It is good enough for the Spaniards, Greasers, Indians, and the mongrel breeds of South America.” The author lauded the exceptional crisp taste that resulted with rice, and added, “for years the ‘blonde,’ or light-colored beers have been fashionable and grown into public favor in America.”
Budweiser was competing with other “shipping brewers,” such as Pabst Brewing, for share of the bottle market more than it was with local breweries that had the advantage of running their own tied houses. “Local brewers focus on working class drinkers who prefer the more affordable draught beer provided at the local saloon, a site which offers far more than beer. Shippers, in contrast, could begin to think about targeting more affluent drinkers who could afford bottle beer,” wrote Stack (2014, 56).
His sideways view is intriguing, particularly when considering how consumers might have evaluated beer at the turn of the century and the importance of locally brewed beer.
Stack believes the categorization should not be large versus small, but shipping versus local. In his view, large and small local breweries had more in common than did the large shippers and large local breweries. He writes, “Local breweries produced unpasteurized draught lager, while the shippers were seeking to promote a uniform, standardized lager, one being shipped and stored for long periods of time.” Nonetheless, by the 1880s some of those local breweries, often large ones, were, in fact, using rice. The Chicago Tribune reported in the same January 30, 1881, article that Conrad Seipp Brewing, Bartholomae & Leicht Brewing, and Messrs. Schmidt & Glade included rice in their beers. Coincidentally, at the time Schmidt & Glade brewed a beer they called Budweiser.
In doing his research, Stack encountered the same frustrations others have when trying to sort out American brewing in the decades before Prohibition. “I searched for but did not locate very many brewery records,” he writes. He makes a strong case for why they could have resisted brewing with adjuncts, but there is no more evidence to support his hypothesis than there is to dispute it.
He questions the standard history in Pabst Brewing Company: The History of an American Business. Author Thomas Cochran wrote, “Careful selection of the finest material and the adoption of the newest brewing processes made Pabst beer generally superior to that produced by some two thousand smaller brewers.” To which Stack countered, “There is no evidence that the shippers used higher-quality inputs than local breweries; in fact, one can argue that some local breweries brewed more consistently with traditional and arguably better input” (Stack 2014, 66).
His thesis is based, in part, on the supposition—and, as his adjectives would indicate, a certain amount of opinion—that the leading shippers used inferior barley (six-row), low grade hops (although these were American hops, and the United States was a leading hop shipper), and cheap adjuncts such as corn and rice. That overlooks the synergy between six-row and adjuncts, the results of which Ted Marti sees what German tourists choose to drink when they come to New Ulm.
*****
The German maypole out front of the red brick buildings at the August Schell brewery is one more reminder of the importance of tradition to the family business.
Marti’s office is in the building that housed brewery employees during the work week in the nineteenth century. They would walk to Schell’s, about two miles from the center of town, on Monday, then return to their homes at the end of their work week. Woods surround the red brick brewery complex on a bluff that overlooks the Cottonwood River, the source of the ice that would cool the brewery’s four icehouses.
New Ulm occupies natural terraces that occur near the confluence of the Cottonwood and Minnesota rivers, otherwise surrounded by flat prairie. August Schell was the first vice president of the Turnverein chapter that helped establish the town and was originally involved in milling. He served in the Minnesota militia during the Dakota War of 1862. Much of the town was destroyed, and the brewery he had started with Jacob Bernhardt in 1860 was ransacked but remained intact. The town already had two breweries when Schell and Bernhardt opened theirs, and five by the time Schell assumed lone ownership of August Schell Brewery. One of them soon closed, and two others did so by the onset of Prohibition. The other, Hauenstein Brewery, remained in operation until 1969. Schell’s was always the biggest.
August Schell Brewing Co. is one of 22 locations in New Ulm on the National Register of Historic Places. The list includes Turner Hall and the Hermann Heights Monument. Referred to somewhat irreverently by locals as Hermann the German, the 102-foot monument depicts Hermann the Cheruscan, the ancient hero whose army liberated Germany from Roman rule in 9°CE. In 2000 the US Congress designated it as a symbol of all citizens of German heritage.
Colorful gnomes grace the garden entrance to August Schell’s 10-room mansion, built in 1885.
No matter which direction Marti heads when he steps out of his office, he bumps into similar history. There are several colorful gnomes beside the door. Beyond them is the gate leading to the now vacant 10-room mansion August Schell built in 1885. Schell designed the brick-and-stone home himself, complete with formal gardens that feature walkways, stone walls, arbors, and benches within a partly sunken garden, but the 50 rows of grapes he imported from along the Rhine are long gone. A deer park and deer remain. Schell collected numerous wild animals for it, including wild geese, cranes, and a monkey. Peacock families still inhabit the grounds and the deer park. “Sometimes one will take off,” Marti said, “and eventually the cops will call and say, ‘Come and get your peacock.’”
This is the place Schell’s beer comes from, and the campaign “We are German craft,” put together by Minneapolis marketing agency Haberman in 2014, seems so logical because of that place. “We did an analysis trying to find basically a space nobody else in the country was occupying,” Marti said. “You’ve got some German-type breweries (but) certainly nobody with the history of ours. It’s always a challenge for an older brewery to be relevent in comparison to all the new breweries. This generation wants everything new and so you always have a challenge, how do you spin an old heritage brewery into something.”
It takes more than a good story or a classic sign. “You can’t make beer with a sign,” Marti said. Yet a few months before, in November 2014, he had announced the brewery would buy the iconic Grain Belt bottle cap sign in Minneapolis. To help preserve and protect the circa 1941 sign in perpetuity, Schell partnered with local historical consultants to have it named to the National Register of Historic Places. The 50-foot-wide, 40-foot-tall sign on Nicollet Island is a beacon from either direction on Hennepin Avenue. Before it went dark in 1996, 1,400 incandescent light bulbs spelled out the beer’s name one letter at a time—G-R-A-I-N B-E-L-T—followed shortly by a flashing “BEER.”
The sign didn’t help Minnesota Brewing, which owned the Grain Belt brand when it closed in 2002, remain relevant. “There were two breweries that had that sign and they went bankrupt,” Marti said, matter-of-factly. He is a master of the aside, adding the perspective that comes with history.
Schell bought the Grain Belt brand in 2002. It had once been almost a million-barrels-per-year beer, but production had slipped to 45,000. “I’ll be honest, I expected it to do like every other brand that gets sold, to have this steady decline to the bottom,” Marti said, illustrating with his right hand. He hadn’t kept the lights on during the previous difficult decades by making decisions based on unrealistic projections. “I calculated the worst case scenario. As it went down we could make our money back and we’d be no worse off for trying.”
In 2015 Schell brewed about 100,000 barrels of Grain Belt beers. “We made better beer,” Marti said, again matter-of-factly explaining what happened. “They were good people, but they didn’t pay attention. When a brewery guy or a production guy runs a plant, they keep their eye on what’s important. When somebody in sales and marketing, or a bean counter, takes over a brewery, it never works. They had the business but they dropped the ball. (The beer was) terribly inconsistent. It would be real sweet one time. It would taste different the next.”
Grain Belt was a product of nineteenth-century brewery consolidation and a victim of twentieth-century consolidation. In 1890 four breweries—motivated by the presence of British brewing syndicates intent on taking over local operations—banded together to form the Minneapolis Brewing and Malting Company. They reorganized the business in 1893, the same year they introduced Golden Grain Belt Old Lager. Within four years it labeled all its beers Grain Belt. Those beers remained the focus after Prohibition ended, and Grain Belt Golden was promoted as “The Friendly Beer with the Friendly Flavor.” Grain Belt Premium eventually replaced Grain Belt Golden and Minneapolis Brewing became Grain Belt Breweries.
Grain Belt bought Storz Brewing Company in 1967, intent on growing larger. Instead, the ride got bumpier. Like other regional breweries, Grain Belt was a victim of price wars. “In the 1960s we were all making the same kind of beer. So much of business was done face to face,” Marti said. “Be out the door at six in the morning, in a bar at eight in the morning. You’re in the bar buying beer; that’s the way locals did business.”
At some point competing on price seemed like a good idea. “You say, ‘I’ll be a dime cheaper.’ I suppose that worked for a while,” he said. “Low-price beer they don’t see as a value. They consider it is cheap.”
In 1975 Grain Belt Breweries shareholders sold the company to local businessman Irwin Jacobs, who was adept at buying distressed businesses and seldom owned them for long. Eight months later Jacobs sold it to G. Heileman Brewing in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Heileman closed the brewery and moved Grain Belt production to Jacob Schmidt Brewing in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Grain Belt was always the red-headed stepchild,” Marti said matter-of-factly.
Heileman closed the Schmidt plant in 1989 and moved production to La Crosse. In Minnesota the rumor was that the brewery no longer used the old Grain Belt recipe, instead blending other beers it produced and calling the result Grain Belt. Within two years a group of investors bought the shuttered Schmidt facility and the Grain Belt label from Heileman, naming their new company Minnesota Brewing. Grain Belt sales briefly improved and Minnesota Brewing produced several other brands under contract. However, by 2001 sales were half of what they had been in 1996, and the brewery was in bankruptcy. Schell won the auction.
“It meant more to us. For us it was more local,” Marti said. “If we didn’t have the local market we’d be out of business.”
Head brewer Dave Berg is a lifelong Minnesotan who went to work at Schell in 2006. He knows Grain Belt well. “It got more consistent, but it’s different,” he said. “People have said that, and they are right. If you like the old version better, then that was better.”
The reasons are pretty simple. The water in New Ulm is much different than in St. Paul. Brewers at Schell made adjustments, but were unable to make a perfect match. Additionally, the Grain Belt/Schmidt/Minnesota Brewing plant had a cereal cooker, although it used liquid adjuncts. So the brewers heated water in the cooker to boiling and pumped it over into the mash to raise the temperature immediately from 118°F to 140°F (47.5°C to 60°C) before increasing it to 162°F (72.5°C). They called this a “jump mash.” Schell does not have a cereal cooker and basically raises the temperature from 118°F to 162°F (47.5°C to 72.5°C), one degree at a time. “It makes for different sugar than a jump mash,” Berg said. Schell uses corn syrup, which brewers begin adding halfway through a two-hour lauter.
Grain Belt ferments with the yeast inherited from Schmidt. It can be a bit of a prima donna, but using it is very important to Marti. “Grain Belt always had that unique taste,” he said. The character is much different than Schell’s house yeast, which was repitched continuously for 35 years. “It (the Schell yeast) is a really strong yeast, a very distinct taste,” Berg said. “Very chardonnay-like with a grape component. For anything Germanic it can be too estery.”
He was a regular Grain Belt drinker—before he began to work at Schell, it was the beer he and other brewers drank when they got together. “I’d never seen Deer Brand when I started working here,” he said, and the beer made a great first impression. “Oh wow, I loved that beer. That yeast does have a different flavor. For some people it can be too much.”
Schell is a lager brewing oddity, using two distinct strains that date back to 1883, when Emil Christian Hansen first isolated pure yeast strains in the Carlsberg brewery laboratory in Denmark. At the close of World War II, the overwhelming majority of breweries in the United States used a strain taken from Carlsberg, while others used one from another Danish brewery, Tuborg. Since then, no US brewery using a Tuborg type has gone out of business, and Anheuser-Busch and Coors have dominated light lager sales; both employ Tuborg-type yeast. Greg Casey spotted this preference for beers fermented by Tuborg-type yeast during 25 years working in management at the five largest US brewing companies. He concluded American lager consumers “prefer the inherently better drinkability imparted by Tuborg-type lager strains—especially in light lagers.”
Schell ferments Deer Brand with a Carlsberg-type yeast, but uses the Tuborg type for Grain Belt and all of its all-grain beers. The choice is a practical one: The Grain Belt/Tuborg yeast is always available, because Grain Belt is brewed so often.
A four-vessel brewhouse was installed in 1997. Two of the tanks came from a defunct brewery in East Germany and the other two are new. The German who helped install the tanks particularly enjoyed the job because he spoke almost no English but had no problem finding New Ulm residents who understood him. It is still a very German town. Every weekday at 11 a.m. KNUJ radio broadcasts polka music for The Dinner Bell Hour. At Schell workers play it in the bottle house by the case packer, bottles zipping by to the 2-4 beat of polka music.
“At one time I knew how to run absolutely everything in the brewery,” Marti said in May 2014, as he was leading a group of visiting brewers past one piece of new equipment after another. “It’s OK, I don’t have to know any more.”
He knows what it is like to operate in survival mode. Marti became brewery president in 1985, succeeding his father. On Warren Marti’s watch they cut down and sold a massive black walnut tree to make payroll. Ted Marti, who was born in 1950, once had aspirations to compete in the Olympics as a gymnast. An injury kept him out in 1972, but he continued training. “I always knew I’d come back here,” he said. When his father called, he did. Annual production dropped below 30,000 barrels, then below 25,000 in the late 1970s.
“We’re going to have to do something different or we don’t survive,” he told himself. The brewery filled collectible beer cans, began brewing all-malt beers, and produced beer under contract. Pete’s Wicked Ales was the first client, and the story about the day in 1991 that Pete’s took its business elsewhere has been told and retold many times at Schell. Joe Owades, who is credited with developing the first light beer and who consulted for many breweries, paid New Ulm a visit on behalf of Pete’s. Sales were booming and Schell was up against capacity, filling almost every fermentation tank available with Pete’s beer. That included ten 140-barrel cypress wood tanks Schell bought in the 1930s.
Owades had never seen anything like the tanks. His job was to assure quality control, and he was not impressed. He walked up to Jeremy Kral, now the brewmaster but then still an hourly worker. Owades, who was not a large man, stuck his finger in the chest of Kral, who is a large man.
“Get our beer out of those tanks,” Owades said. According to the legend that has grown around this event he included an expletive, probably two. Those who know Owades say he would not have used profanity. They do believe he would have added a theatrical pause before finishing, with or without an additional expletive, “And yesterday was too late.”
Nonethless, many other contract customers followed, including Spanish Peaks Brewing Co., 3 Floyds Brewing Co., SLO Brewing Co., and Schlafly Brewing Company, before Schell acquired the Grain Belt brand.
The tanks, however, were retired.
“Luckily, my dad never throws anything away,” said Jace Marti, one of three brothers working for their father. Jace became a brewer, Kyle works in sales and marketing, and Franz is the groundskeeper, head gardener, and draft line specialist.
In 2008 Jace began rehabilitating two of the tanks. The plan was to make a beer in them to serve for the brewery’s 150th anniversary in 2010, but it took too long to swell them (that is, to get them to hold water). By the time they were ready the Martis decided to use them in an entirely different way. Jace had already developed an obsession with Berliner weisse before he spent time in Germany at brewing school and “made it (his) own personal mission to learn as much as possible about Berliner weisse history and production techniques.”
In 2016 Schell opened a 12,000-square-foot production facility and taproom on the other side of New Ulm. Brewers produce the wort at the eastside brewhouse, then truck the beer over to the Star Keller on the west side. All of the Noble Star beers are sour, most of them related to Berliner weisse. Framboise du Nord won a bronze medal in the German-Style Sour Ale category in the 2014 World Beer CupSM competition. “This project takes a part of brewing history completely unique to Schell’s and reuses it to produce something totally new and different—way beyond its original intention,” Jace said.
“This is going to be a really good project for us. It opens up a lot of doors,” said his father. “Nobody else has 75-year-old original tanks they are brewing in. You can’t get more authentic than what we’re doing. And that authenticity is going to get more relevant when you’ve got 3,300 breweries and all are under five years old and pretty much making the same kind of beer. People are going to say, ‘What’s different about that?’”
Ted Marti turned 65 in 2015. None of his sons expects him to retire soon, but all three are fully engaged with the brewery. “My parents actually made it a point to say that we didn’t have to come back,” Kyle said when all three were interviewed by a Minnesota business magazine. “They said that over and over again—and they still say it to this day. Still, for me it was always in the plan. I was always going to come back and work here in one fashion or another.”
Kyle understands the challenges ahead. The single-lane road leading to the brewery that workers would stroll along 150 years ago can get crowded. “When we’re running full-tilt, we have a pallet of 42 cases coming off every three and a half minutes,” he said. “To keep up with that, they have to load the trailer, bring it to the warehouse, unload the trailer, bring back the trailer, and do it all over. Right now, we have a truck coming and going every 30 minutes. If we increase capacity any more, the road won’t be able to hold up. The traffic will be too much to handle.”
It’s important to the Martis that the brewery not be isolated from the community. “This is where we’re from,” Franz said. “My dad’s always been adamant about helping where he could, and that value has continued through the family. Even starting with August Schell, they always seemed to help people who lived in their community. It’s not a very nice community if everyone just sticks to themselves.”
Mention the Marti name at the bar at Turner Hall and people nod and smile. “Good boys, good family,” the bartender said, turning to point to the Schell taphandles. “You know, they make this beer.” In New Ulm, and only in New Ulm, Deer Brand outsells Grain Belt. All the stools were full on this particular Wednesday evening. Not everybody was drinking beer, but most were, including the man wearing a Minnesota Vikings cap and putting salt in a schooner of Grain Belt.
It was a familiar tableau. “I think we’ll get back to where beer is a social thing rather than the thing,” Ted Marti said.
1 After August Schell died in 1891, his son, Otto, managed the brewery until his death in 1911. George Marti, who had married Otto’s daughter, Emma, then took the reins and the Marti family has continued to run the brewery for more than 100 years.
2 During his testimony, Thomas Read from Read & Sons in Troy listed all the ingredients used: “Say from 3 to 3 1/2 bushels of malt to a barrel and from 2 1/2 to 5 pounds of hops to a barrel and about four quarts of fine salt for 60 or 70 barrels—say in our pale ale we put in two or three pints of honey to the barrel.”
3 R refers to Réaumur temperature scale, once widely used in Europe.